74 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



This is really a most important admission. Darwin, for example, says : 

 "Nature can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional 

 difference." Again : " Under nature the slightest differences of struc- 

 ture and constitution may well turn the nicely balanced scale in the 

 straggle for life, and so be preserved."* It is a somewhat significant 

 fact that having studied this subject from 1839 to 1868, the date of the 

 publication of his " Animals and Plants under Domestication," Darwin 

 could only write in the extremely hypothetical style, which is so patent in 

 the passage quoted, wherein he describes natural selection ; and that he was 

 obliged to invent an illustration from architecture, instead of giving some 

 actual cases among animals and plants, in which new variations were esta- 

 blished by means of natural selection. Nature cannot have stopped the 

 process ; evolution must still be going on ; yet no Darwinian has given any 

 illustration in clear proof of the origin of a variety, by means of natural 

 selection, during the last f rty years since the " Origin of Species " appeared. 



" If an architect were to rear a noble and commodious edifice without 

 the use of cut stone by selecting from the fragments at the base of a 

 precipice wedge-shaped stones for his arches, elongated stones for his 

 lintels, and flat stones for his roof, we should admire his skill and regard 

 him as the paramount power. Now the, fragments of stone, though in- 

 dispensable to the architect, bear to the edifice built by him the same 

 relation t which the fluctuating variations of each organic being bear to 

 the varied and admirable structures ultimately acquired by its modified 

 descendants." i 



It could scarcely be better shown how totally void of any natural law 

 the process stands. Huxley called it a "method of trial and error." But 

 no such method exists in other of Nature's laws. If gravitation, the laws 

 of heat, &c. were inconstant, we could not depend upon them ; yet in the 

 highest and noblest work of Nature— the making of plants and animals, 

 including man — the process is supposed to be due to chance variations 

 44 having no relationship to the requirements of the being." 



Darwin, Wallace, Weismann, and others all attribute the inducement 

 to vary to changed conditions of life, whether occurring in the district where 

 the organisms are living, or whether through their migration— the most 

 usual case — into other countries. 



" As Professor Weismann has lately insisted, there are two factors, 

 namely, the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions. 



" Indefinite variability is a much more common result of changed con- 

 ditions than dvjinitc variability. . . . We see indefinite variability in 

 the endless slight peculiarities which distinguish the individuals of the 

 -ami' species. " <j These he called "individual differences." |j These two 

 \\ rdfl "definite" and "indefinite" demand our special attention, as well 

 as 44 individual differences," to which he here refers. 



It is often Baid by partially informed writers that natural selection is a 

 came of variations. This has arisen from the unfortunate style in which 

 Darwin and Wallace have described it in metaphorical language. 



* (h u/iii nf S/, cries Ac., p. 05. 



t In reality, the point to be specially noticed is tlie want of any relation at all 

 between them. 



X Animals and J 'hints under Domestication, vol. ii. p. 430. 

 § Unrjin Ac. p. 0. || Ibid. p. 34. 



